GHOSTS.. OF THE CIVIL DEAD

THE.. OFFICIAL SITE

Ghosts on the Precipice of Law and Order Avalanche:
Ghosts of the Civil Dead in the Age of Neoliberal
Capitalism.

The prison film, Ghosts of the Civil Dead, was researched
and made in the period 1984 –1988.

In economic terms the period from 1980 to the present
(2006) is referred to as the ‘neoliberal ‘ era.
Neoliberal ism began in 1981 and had as its most prominent
public ideologues, Reagan and Thatcher. It has enjoyed, in
mainstream western circles, an almost unassailable position
of supposed self evident logic, as if it were the simple
stating of a law of nature. Neoliberalism is (by choice in
some cases, under duress or threat in many others) now the
prevailing economic dogma of virtually every nation on
Earth and the supra-national bodies guarding global matters
(World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade
Organization).

Neoliberalism is characterized by slashing of the role of
the state from its broader public functions (welfare,
public services, education, regulation); privatization of
state assets; de-regulation of financial markets; assaults
on labor; tax cuts to the rich; infiltration of ‘the
market’ into every facet of human existence. It has
resulted in two marked features across the world: a massive
distribution of wealth upward (particularly to richest 1%
who control between 35-50% of wealth and assets) and a vast
increase in incarceration rates in the ‘west’ -
the locking up of the growing ‘surplus
population’.

In
the USA, the homeland of the empire and from where this
dictate to the world is issued (also the theoretical home
of the film), this increase in incarceration rates has been
massive. There are now over 6.5 million people inside the
criminal justice system on any day in the U.S., 2.1 million
of which are in prison. These are figures that are three
and a half times what they were in 1981.

The ‘War on Drugs’ is the key source providing
this stream of human product to feed the
‘justice’ machine. But this ‘war’
is but a ruse to camouflage what is effectively, in
America, a race (and class) war. Consider this: one in
three black American men between ages of 21 and 29 are
under some type of criminal justice control on any given
day.

And to house/ contain this expanding surplus population? A
riot of prison construction has taken place. The U.S
Justice Department budget grew900%in this same twenty year period
(1981-2001) as law and order became a compulsory high
priority for any aspiring politician. New prisons sprang up
all over and not so much the futuristic insidious
‘new generation’ prisons of our film, but super
penitentiaries housing up to 5,000 inmates.

And it’s important to note that while Nth America is
at the extreme end of the imprisonment curve (as it
rigorously moves to make its domestic population
malleable), this ‘trend’ is consistent across
the west.

It’s also not just a raw rise in inmate numbers or
new prisons we are witnessing, but also a qualitative jump
in the use of harsher, more punitive incarceration. Welcome
to the “Supermax” Penitentiary where up to
5,000 inmates are routinely confined to their cells 23
hours a day, seven days a week with 1 hour a day for
solitary exercise. This ‘lockdown’ regime,
which was formerly only an emergency measure, is now in
wide practice in every state of the U.S. union and many
more ‘civilized’ nations beyond.

Ghosts of the Civil Dead starts and ends when just such an
emergency lockdown is imposed following “an outbreak
of violence”. The film is based on events that
occurred at United States Penitentiary, Marion, Illinois,
at that time the highest level security prison in the USA,
housing the “worst of the worst”. It’s
plot – that guards and inmates alike are provoked by
“the administration” in order to create that
violence, in order to lock that prison down – is
taken from the claims of Guards at Marion at that time.

The film is structured around the Committee that has been
appointed to report on the events that led to that
lockdown. That ‘report’ is largely taken from
the Committee report into events at Marion which recommends
(copied at our film’s end), that a “new
supermax facility” be immediately built.

Those events at Marion occurred in 1983, right at the
outset of the Neoliberal era and on the precipice of what
was to become a law and order avalanche. They were a key
component in preparing the ground for the incarceration
explosion and the birth and rapid rise of the Supermax. For
the containment of the unprecedented numbers of a growing
surplus population in increasingly harsh conditions that we
witness today.

While the state in this period has been mercilessly
stripped, citing economic necessity, of much of its
benevolent public function, it’s role and financial
commitment to monitoring/ surveillance/ policing and
incarceration has been exponentially stepped up.

Meanwhile, the Neoliberal era has delivered profit rates
for companies that are up from the post war average of
between 4-8% to the Neoliberal average of 8-16%.